NOVEL NEXT 1.2.6.1 Goods support
In the previous episode...
1.2.5 An Idiosyncratic Interlude
How much distraction could Alderney possibly cause?
That afternoon, she found out.
First she was appointed as a mascot for the Drone Driving Fraternity, the village’s new team for the sport of competitive drone flying, which Alderney had funded to give an excuse for the DDF members (a handful of villagers pledged to protect the secret of Nadine being Kafana when online) to fly drones (which would actually be used to keep watch for signs of outsiders trying to spy on the village). This resulted in her being dragged off to watch a team practice session, and learning a disquieting amount about modern unmanned warfare, and its psychological effect upon people.
Next, in order to ensure DDF members could move around without being spotted by satellites (using a special ring, created by Alderney), so they could casually intercept possible human spies before they could approach her home, Kafana found herself involved in another exercise in stealth and deception - this time while being followed by the entire village.
She started to research the Hexoikos Bungo had mentioned, the six wealthiest dynasties, that between them dominated a frightening number of countries and industries:
Jiang Aristotle China (finance)
Feodor Yerkes Luna (space, military)
Alwyn Spreckels Germany (real estate, media)
Patrick Huttleston the Americas (nuclear, biotech, chemical)
Benjamin Harriman the Middle East (transport, mining, alternative energy)
William Astor the Corporate Polity Commonwealth (automation, military)
But didn’t get beyond identifying Brian Huttleston, Ludwig Spreckels and Jiang Jacqueline as the members most likely to be watching anything the Wombles did with tiara technology, before she had to return to her duties running her kafana, and dealing with the human-like robot body that Alderney had created for Ketah (the expert system helping with the cooking, alongside the newly employed Gorana).
The next distraction couldn’t really be blamed on Alderney. Kafana herself had come up with the plan for dealing with snoops looking specifically for someone who sang like Kafana did in the game (which was how the DDF discovered the secret), if one tried to use a biometric scanner as a lie detector. Have everyone tell lies! In particular, have them falsely claim Kafana was the best singer in the world, and then Kafana would sing badly while the spy was in earshot. But then the DDF required her to practise, and she only escaped the humiliation of putting on the worst performance of her life when Alderney stuck her in a chair and then used some drones to carry them both to the very top of the mountain.
A perfect place to relax and just think about the decision she had to make? No, not a chance. Alderney connected her up to a network of telescopes, and bombarded her with new sights and ideas until she could scarcely keep her eyes open. She fell asleep, dreaming of strange alien species spreading in waves across the galaxy, singing to each other in many voices - and some of those voices were so powerful that listening to them even once would slay a star. She felt the wonder of the songs; felt the terror as some blocked their ears entirely because they couldn’t know in advance which voices would be deadly, and felt great loss as many unique songs faded into the void between the stars - not heard and now beyond any retrieval.
Half her thinking time spent and still no decision, damn it. Should she cancel tomorrow’s tour? Normally she’d choose going full out to show Alderney the best of Bosnian hospitality, because she wouldn’t feel comfortable about letting her friend down. It wouldn’t be ‘her’. But what if becoming a leader required changing into a more dutiful sort of person who’d choose instead to cancel and lock herself in a lonely room all day? If that were the price demanded by the new role, she might be able to make change; but how much of her old self was she willing to give up?
...now read on!
1 Soul Bound
1.2 Taking Control
1.2.6 An Assumed Role
1.2.6.1 Goods support
Salat Fajr, Friday June 9th, 2045
Hotel Holiday, Sarajevo
Jürgen ‘Sand Rat’ Lipszyc
As always, Jürgen wore his trademark sand-coloured flak jacket which hung loosely on his tall body as he gazed morosely at the polished wooden floor of the hotel’s air-conditioned café.
On the seat opposite him sat Vanessa, though she didn’t have a breakfast plate given that she was just an orglife illusion, projected by the tiara he’d been forced to wear continuously. He’d tried taking it off briefly the night before, and been immediately phoned by his boss who had shouted at him for 10 minutes straight about violating contracts.
At least his plate wasn’t an illusion. On the theory that food might help substitute for sleep, he’d used his one allowed trip to the buffet table to pile it as high as possible, using a scientific approach - first a ring of cantilevered sausages poking beyond the plate’s rim, then a central piece of toast piled with heavy beans to fix them in place. Carefully balanced crisp bacon planks covering the sausage rafters, with light but bulky buttered bread rolls balanced on them, leaving the centre to be filled with four boiled eggs as structural support, then more toast, and finally a stack of maple syrup covered pancakes.
He’d filled his jacket’s many pockets with extra fruit, cutlery, a pint glass of orange juice and another of the strongest coffee they made, before walking back to the table carrying the loaded plate with the care normally given by explosives experts to undefused enemy bombs.
Vanessa’s jaw had dropped slack in amazement (or possibly horror), but wisely she had chosen not to comment. Instead she’d asked a far more wounding question.
“So, you’ve spent the past 48 hours watching every bit of footage these Wombles have released. What have you picked up, that my expert systems didn’t extract in their first 10 minute scan of the same recordings?”
She brought up a list of the six Wombles, each with a probabilistic list of arlife skills and backgrounds indicated (it listed a 37% chance of Bulgaria being a con artist with a police record), and a global heat map showing the geographic distribution of individuals matching the requisites.
“I’ve been developing a psychological profile. You’ve been looking at what they’ve done and said. I’ve been thinking about why they’ve made the choices they have, why they feel the emotions they feel, why they’ve presented certain scenes from a particular viewpoint and what they’ve chosen not to show. I’ve been thinking about who they are, what sort of people they are: their beliefs and motives.”
Vanessa nodded, and listened intently. He liked that about her. She was proud of her expert systems and the skills with them she’d developed during her Ph.D from Charles University in Prague. She liked to be right, but she was always ready to listen, to gain more data, and was swift to acknowledge when she’d overlooked something. Probably better at it than he was, a small guilty voice whispered to him - he tended to get defensive and sulky when a hunch didn’t pan out.
“Let me give an example. You looked at the alias ‘Kafana’. What did you deduce from it?”
“Based on pronunciation, there’s a 75% chance she’s from Serbia, Croatia or Bosnia. 15% from Albania, Macedonia, Slovenia or Montenegro. 5% from Italy, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece or Turkey. And a 5% chance she’s a coffee fan who visited once on holiday, or someone whose parents lived in the target area.”
“Right. But now if you throw in the baklava she made and Emina, the song she sang on the first day, a link with Bosnia in particular becomes a near certainty.”
“True, but she also speaks English without an accent, sang an obscure English folk song, and cooked jugged rabbit. And all the other Wombles speak English too. I could make cases for Greece, Italy, Spain or Austria too. We mustn’t get trapped by our assumptions. Intersecting circles of probability and using the metadata is the way to go.”
He shook his head.
“I’m unconvinced. We don’t know they are in the same location, or even that they have ever been in the same geographic location. We need to identify the weakest link. Once we have one of them narrowed down to a manageable number of candidate individuals, then we’ve a chance of investigating the acquaintances of the candidates to see if they match the other Wombles. How are you doing on biometrics?”
“They’re using custom-written morphs, nothing I can reverse. I can’t even be sure of age or gender for most of them. At the 95% confidence level: Bungo is shorter in arlife than his avatar (he hits his head on doorways too much), Alderney is taller, Bulgaria and Tomsk are male and Kafana is female. I’m building up an idiolect dictionary for each of them, but no strong matches yet. Mr. Spreckels has given me access to some truly impressive global data stores to match again. Half of it stuff I didn’t even know could be collected, let alone that someone had. There’s even a lookup table, indexed by types of sneeze.”
She paused a moment, then went on.
“So, now you’ve watched the recordings, what are your psychological profiles telling you?”
He grinned. She’d bought the story. He didn’t actually construct profiles. What he really did was let his subconscious run free until it fed him a hunch. But you couldn’t say that and be taken seriously, so over time he’d come up with a cover story that logical types would find acceptable. He finished peeling another boiled egg, mashing it inside a bread roll and pouring mayonnaise and tomato ketchup over it, to draw out the suspense a little.
“They’re too good to be new to this. Not only have they worked as a team, at least some of them have to be experienced Soul Bound players. Bungo’s shown legacy skills, which means he played on Divine Mountain and was good enough not just to stay over level 60 without being PK’ed, but also to get a superior enhanced stat skill which is end-game stuff. Somewhere out there are players who’ll recognise him. Find who he was, and you’ll have years of data on him, not just one week. Maybe data from before he had a privacy morph or knew people might be trying to identify him.”
She smiled, which lit up her otherwise thin and emotionless face.
“That would be nice. I’ll get started on indexing people by teams they’ve worked closely with others upon. What’s your next move?”
“Me? I’m going to grab some sleep, then hit up some old friends in gamer guilds. See if I can get them gossiping about well known players who’ve transferred from Divine Mountain but not reappeared where expected. I’ll search the boards for rumours, and maybe plant a few of my own.”
She sighed.
“This is so slow. I wish we could hire more people. We’ll locate the Wombles eventually; nowadays you’d have to be a fanatic to avoid leaking all identifying information, and what they’re doing is just not important enough for anyone to want to spend that level of effort. But I’m not sure we’ll get you that interview in the next five days. I really want that research funding.”
He felt his hackles rising again. Something Vanessa has said felt wrong. He couldn’t put his finger on it.
As she stood to leave, what he said was, “All we can do is try our hardest.”
But later, as he tried to fall asleep, the thought turning over and over in his head was, “I’m missing something. Something important. What am I missing?”